A Tale of Two Nations: Implementation of the Death Penalty in "Executing" Versus "Symbolic" States in the United States

The international community views the US as monolithic and anomalous in its retention of the death penalty. The contrast, however, between the US and the rest of the Western democratic world obscures the extent to which the US is not monolithic in its death penalty practices. The US now houses three sorts of jurisdictions: states without the death penalty by law ("abolitionist states"), states with the death penalty but insignificant numbers of executions ("symbolic states"), and states with both the death penalty in law and in practice -- states actively carrying out executions ("executing states"). This article will describe the existing execution gap between symbolic and executing states and offer some tentative explanations for its magnitude and persistence. The analysis will focus on the two outliers in the current regime: Texas and California. The comparison reveals no single explanatory variable but rather a host of differences that contribute to the vast divide in execution rates.